Almost Willfully Out of Contact With the World

Abstract

Many in the gay theatre-going audiences had always known of Williams’s homosexuality; he had never hidden his private life. Donald Vining reflected the degree to which gay audiences had embraced Williams as an icon when he wrote in his diary about the large audience of queer men who cheered at the curtain calls for The Rose Tattoo in 1951. In 1968, when Mart Crowley included references to Suddenly Last Summer in The Boys in the Band, he felt no need to explain them. This embrace of Williams by a New York gay audience would not last, however, very much beyond Crowley’s play. Changes in the social and political climate, as well as in coverage of gay playwrights in the New York press, and, most importantly, changes in the attitudes of gay men and women themselves, would turn Williams into a figure of ridicule, when not ignored altogether, for many in the emerging gay community of the early 1970s.

Keywords

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Donald Webster Cory and John P. LeRoy, The Homosexual and His Society: A View From Within (New York: The Citadel Press, 1963), 3. By 1973, Sagarin had changed his mind and, writing under his real name, affirmed that a cure was indeed possible and desirable.Google Scholar

Donald Vining, A Gay Diary Volume Four, 1967–1975 (New York: Pepys Press, 1983), 28. When Vining saw Joe Orton’s Loot two months later, he wrote, “There is quite a play in the author’s life but I wouldn’t try to write it because the public already thinks of the homosexual life as more violent and wretched than it is” (33).Google Scholar